Paul Celan

Threadsuns

Threadsuns
over the grayblack wasteness.
A tree-
high thought
strikes the light-tone: there are
still songs to sing beyond
humankind.

To stand

To stand, in the shadow
of a scar in the air.

Stand-for-no-one-and-nothing.
Unrecognized,
for you
alone.

With all that has room within it,
even without
language.


There was earth inside them

There was earth inside them, and
they dug.

They dug and dug, and so
their day went past, their night. And they did not praise God,
who, so they heard, wanted all this,
who, so they heard, witnessed all this.

They dug and heard nothing more;
they did not grow wise, invented no song,
devised for themselves no sort of language.
They dug.

There came a stillness then, came also storm,
all of the oceans came.
I dig, you dig, and it digs too, the worm,
and the singing there says: They dig.

O one, o none, o no one, o you:
Where did it go then, making for nowhere?
O you dig and I dig, and I dig through to you,
and the ring on our finger awakens.


Flower

The stone.
The stone in the air, which I followed.
Your eye, as blind as the stone.

We were
hands,
we baled the darkness empty, we found
the word that ascended summer:
flower.

Flower - a blind man's word.
Your eye and mine:
they see
to water.

Growth.
Heart wall upon heart wall
adds petals to it.

One more word like this word, and the hammers
will swing over open ground.


Count up the almonds

Count up the almonds,
count what was bitter and kept you waking,
count me in too:

I sought your eye when you looked out and no one saw you,
I spun that secret thread
where the dew you mused on
slid down to pitchers
tended by a word that reached no one's heart.

There you first fully entered the name that is yours,
you stepped toward yourself on steady feet,
the hammers swung free in the belfry of your silence,
things overheard thrust through to you,
what's dead put its arm around you too,
and the three of you walked through the evening.

Render me bitter.
Number me among the almonds.


Homecoming

Snowfall, denser and denser,
dove-coloured as yesterday,
snowfall, as if even now you were sleeping.

White, stacked into distance.
Above it, endless,
the sleigh track of the lost.

Below, hidden,
presses up
what so hurts the eyes,
hill upon hill,
invisible.

On each,
fetched home into its today,
an I slipped away into dumbness:
wooden, a post.

There: a feeling,
blown across by the ice wind
attaching its dove- its snow-
coloured cloth as a flag.

Tenebrae

Near are we, Lord,
near and graspable.

Grasped already, Lord,
clawed into each other, as if
each of our bodies were
your body, Lord.

Pray, Lord,
pray to us,
we are near.

Wind-skewed we went there,
went there to bend
over pit and crater.

Went to the water-trough, Lord.

It was blood, it was
what you shed, Lord.

It shined.

It cast your image into our eyes, Lord.
Eyes and mouth stand so open and void, Lord.
We have drunk, Lord.
The blood and the image that was in the blood, Lord.

Pray, Lord.
We are near.

Stretto

*

Taken off into
the terrain
with the unmistakable trace:

Grass, written asunder. The stones, white
with the grassblades' shadows:
Read no more—look!
Look no more—go!

Go, your hour
has no sisters, you are—
are at home. Slowly a wheel
rolls out of itself, the spokes
clamber,
clamber on the blackened field, night
needs no stars, nowhere
are you asked after.

*

	Nowhere
		are you asked after—

The place where they lay, it has
a name—it has
none. They did not lie there. Something
lay between them. They
did not see through it.

Did not see, no,
spoke of
words. Not one
awoke,
sleep
came over them.

*

	Came, came. Nowhere
		asked—

I'm the one, I,
I lay between you, I was
open, was
audible, I ticked toward you, your breath
obeyed, I
am still the one, and
you're sleeping.

*

Am still the one—

Years.
Years, years, a finger
gropes down and up, gropes
all around:
sutures, palpable, here
it gapes wide open, here
it grew back together—who
covered it up?

*

	Covered it
		up—who?

Came, came.
Came a word, came,
came through the night,
would glisten, would glisten.

Ashes.
Ashes, ashes.
Night.
Night-and-night.—Go
to the eye, to the moist one.

*

	Go
		to the eye,
			to the moist one—

Hurricanes.
Hurricanes, from all time,
particle flurry, the other thing,
you
know this, we
read it in a book, was
opinion.

Was, was
opinion. How
did we take
hold—hold with
these
hands?

It was also written that.
Where? We
decked it in silence,
poison-hushed, huge
a
green
silence, a sepal, a
thought of something plantlike hung there—
green, yes,
hung, yes,
under spiteful
skies.

Of, yes,
plantlike.

Yes.
Hurricanes, par-
ticle flurry, there was still
time, still,
to try with the stone—it
was welcoming, it
did not interrupt. How
good we had it:

Grainy,
grainy and stringy. Stalky,
thick;
bunchy and radiate; knobby,
level and
lumpy; crumbling, out-
branching--: the stone, it
did not interrupt, it
spoke,
spoke gladly to dry eyes, before it shut them.

Spoke, spoke.
Was, was.

We
would not let go, stood firm
in the midst, a
framework of pores, and
it came.

Came up to us, came
on through, it mended
invisibly, mended
on the final membrane,
and
the world, thousandfaced crystal,
shot out, shot out.

*

	Shot out, shot out.
		Then—

Nights, demixed. Circles,
green or blue, red
squares: the
world sets its inmost
at stake with the new
hours.--Circles,
red or black, bright
squares, no
flight shadow,
no
plane table, no
chimney soul rises and joins in.

*

	Rises and
		joins in—

At owls' flight, near the
petrified lepra,
near
our fugitive hands, at
the latest rejection,
above the
bullet trap on
the ruined wall:

visible, once
again: the
grooves, the

choirs, back then, the
Psalms. Ho, ho-
sannah.

Therefore
temples still stand. A
star
may still give light.
Nothing,
nothing is lost.

Ho-
sannah.

At owls' flight, here,
the conversations, daygray,
of groundwater traces.

*

	(— —daygray,
		of
		groundwater traces—

Taken off
into the terrain
with
the unmistakable
trace:

Grass.
Grass,
written asunder.)